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Body Scissors

The year is 1991, the city is Austin, and a young black girl is killed by a stray bullet meant for her political activist mother, Virginia Key. So opens Body Scissors (Viking), the notable second thriller from MICHAELSIMON featuring the Capital City’s lone Jewish homicide detective, Dan Reles. The gunman is a junkie, and his trail leads to a predictably druggie underworld. Reles, clever lad, soon connects the dots between the planes returning from the Middle East to Bergstrom Air Force Base (remember Operation Desert Storm?) and the sudden appearance of high-grade heroin on Austin’s streets. Simon captures the dark side of a city being whipsawed by construction booms and oil busts, and distinctions between good and evil fade to an undefined gray in Reles’s world-weary, cynical eyes.